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Africa and its peoples have a long and distinguished history. The earliest evidence for humankind is found on the continent, and some of the first successful efforts to domesticate plants and produce metals involved African pioneers and innovators . Africans constructed complex societies, some with elaborate political hierarchies and others with dynamic governance systems without titular authorities such as kings and queens. Extensive commercial networks connected local producers in diverse environmental niches with regional markets, and these networks in turn were connected to transcontinental trade networks funneling goods to Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The trans-Atlantic slave trade did not bring European colonization to Africa; only centuries later, when Europeans had more powerful weapons and mechanized transportation, could they invade the continent. Colonial rule ended quickly, however, leaving the current configuration of more than fifty independent states. Historians have debated whether the European colonial period was a transformative era or merely an interlude in the continent’s history. Colonial rule introduced new and enduring political boundaries and unleashed powerful economic forces that remain influential to this day, but it also was uneven in its impact and ambiguous in its transformations. Africans appropriated new ideas, but they continued to draw from the deep wells of local cultural resources. Colonial rule never was so draconian that it prevented Africans from trying to shape their own history, but African efforts were constrained. Formal educational opportunities brought new languages and topics to African students, but indigenous knowledge and the social apprenticeships associated with its transmission remained vital. Some arguing for colonialism’s transformative power would go so far as to suggest that Africa’s history only began with the arrival of Europeans. In the early 1960s the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that “perhaps in future there will be some [African] history to teach. But, at present, there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness . . . and darkness is not a John Akare Aden and John H. Hanson Legacies of the Past Themes in African History 2 Legacies of the Past 33 subject of history.”1 Trevor-Roper’s views are based on assumptions about limited African capacity that unfortunately had dominated European understandings for several generations. His scholarly discipline was only just beginning to recognize African history as a field of inquiry, even though Africans, African Americans, and others had been writing histories of the continent for centuries. It took African independence for the field of African history to flower fully as a recognized scholarly activity in Europe and North America, and in the half century since independence , historians of Africa have produced significant work and made the field a vital arena of inquiry. This chapter cannot review all aspects of Africa’s history, nor can it convey all the developments of the last hundred years. It discusses several themes, suggesting along the way why some argue that the colonial era was an interlude and why others view it as transformative. It begins with themes related to Africa’s history before European colonial rule and then examines the European colonial conquest and its aftermath . Some themes are elaborated for the contemporary era in other chapters, and this chapter provides historical background for the more focused discussions to come. Each region has its own distinctive history, and inquisitive students will want to learn more about the African past on their own. MIGRATION AND CULTURAL EXCHANGES IN AFRICAN HISTORY Africans have always been on the move. Out-migration from Africa is the most probable explanation for the peopling of the world, and migration also occurred internally. The earliest movements are impossible to reconstruct, but Africa’s linguistic diversity provides a key to uncovering some of this past. Africans currently speak more than two thousand distinct languages, but each language falls into one of four large language families that initially developed separately for millennia: AfroAsiatic , Khoisan, Niger-Congo, and Nilo-Saharan. Languages in the same family share some vocabulary and certain grammatical features, and each language develops on its own terms, often as a dialect of an existing language before transformations create a new language. Archeological and botanical analyses suggest that the initial linguistic diversity reflects different choices about the transition from gathering and hunting to food production: speakers of the Khoisan languages retained the earliest human lifestyle in the Kalahari Desert and isolated regions in eastern Africa, whereas populations associated with the other language families shifted to food production with different main crops at various times beginning...

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